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Tuesday, December 13, 2016

What is so secret about the information even India's enemies know?

What is a secret? Sometimes, it is a conundrum presented this way:
The Indian “surgical strikes” across the line of control are a secret at
varying levels not only in India, but also in Pakistan. In Islamabad,
information on them is kept under wraps because to acknowledge is to
lose face. On the other hand, New Delhi is cagey about giving any more
details, because they were (a) more limited than has been made out by
those who want to use them for political effect and/or (b) so as to keep
the impact of the operation within manageable limits and (c) not reveal
the modus operandi of the forces.To further develop this point:
In the 1993-2016 period, too, cross-border strikes were carried out, but
kept secret. Considering that the enemy who had been hit, knew about
them, why did the government of the day keep them a secret?
Likewise,
when the government buys equipment abroad, it provides specifications
to several foreign companies, yet, keeps them, as well as the
acquisitions procedure and processes, secret from the public.

Secrets and secrets

The
government generates an enormous amount of information in its daily
activity. Some of this information is about future plans, the rest is
part of the process of governance – actions taken or to be taken, after
action reports, directives, letters, notations, orders and so on. Some
of it must be kept confidential or secret for a period of time,
otherwise governance would become difficult. Some of it needs to be kept
confidential so as not to damage relations with other countries. And
then, there is information about military plans and procedures, the
capabilities and capacities of military equipment and their deployment,
which could aid enemies of the country.
But there are no absolute
secrets. Decisions are implemented, directives acted upon, systems
selected and acquired and therefore the information about them is known
at some point in time, military equipment gets obsolete or so much more
sophisticated that old plans change. So secrets are limited in time and
value, though there is one category of secrets that are held very, very
carefully – that of high level penetrations of the political, military,
diplomatic and administrative personnel of a target country.
These
are often, literally, kept forever. The reason is, of course, that such
a high level of betrayal is punishable by death in many countries. But,
more important, keeping their names secret is a means through which the
recruiting country assures potential future agents that their betrayal
will never be revealed, in other words it is an incentive for
recruitment. After all if it is known that a particular country is
casual with its agents, it is unlikely to remain in the business of what
is known as Humint (human intelligence – covert intelligence-gathering
by agents) for very long.
When the British left India, the one
thing they took with them in entirety were intelligence files, and you
can be sure there would be some very well known names amongst our
revered national leaders who were their informants. Likewise, the
Intelligence Bureau holds tight the list of its informants in various
political parties. Were these lists to be leaked, the IB would be out of
the business of political intelligence, which is its real bread and
butter.
All parts of the government, especially those involved in
security like the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and so on, have a
system of ascending scale of classification – confidential, restricted,
secret and top secret – which is determined by section officers, under
secretaries and deputy secretaries or their equivalent officers.

Official Secrets Act, 1923

The
problem often is in defining what exactly is a secret. The vagueness
over what is secret begins from the archaic Official Secrets Act of 1923
which was essentially aimed at military threats against India and
remains the main legislation dealing with the issue of preserving
secrets.
It seeks punishment for any person who obtained “any
secret code password, sketch, plan model, article or note or any other
document” that could adversely affect the sovereignty and integrity of
the country, its security, or friendly relations with another country.
Such a person was liable to be punished with three years imprisonment.
On the other hand, if this activity related to a military facility, or
the affairs of the military, the imprisonment could be up to 14 years.
The
OSA’s infirmities have been manifest in many a court decision where the
prosecution has fumbled on the issue of defining what is secret. Why do
you think that this country has never punished a spy with death or life
imprisonment? It is not that we are so patriotic that we have never had
a spy or traitor who deserves such a punishment, but that our law is as
infirm as our counter-intelligence capabilities.
But while the
OSA is clear, and does provide a legal definition, howsoever obsolete as
to what is secret, we have no clarity about the sanctity of the
documents of the other departments of government, including the Cabinet
and the Prime Minister’s Office or, for that matter, the Finance
Ministry.
That is why, you rarely get a prosecution of a person
for stealing secrets and that is also the reason that when the police
catch low level ISI field agents, they are always alleged to have a
diary or maps and sketches with them. I say alleged, because in the era
of satellites and cameras, you don’t need sketches and maps to be drawn
by some low level operative. What an agent may need is the ability to
determine whether a particular bridge or culvert can hold a 50 tonne
tank, and none of the agents that are caught have either the equipment
or the education to determine that though they can probably purchase
the information from the government office where the designs are kept.

Declassification of records

The
government of India has taken the progressive view that the public has
right to all information on governmental functioning and has passed
two legislations – the Right to Information Act in 2005 and the Public
Records Act of 1993 to create a practical regime for the citizens to
secure access to information under the control of public authorities.
This has been done with a view of encouraging transparency and
accountability, but making information public needs to be an end in
itself.
However, neither of the acts are working too well. The RTI
is being used by people to settle scores, while the Public Records Act
is ignored. Because of faulty procedures, many documents, particularly
of field formations, exist as functional files and kept only till they
are current or useful, and they are destroyed thereafter. The decisions
are often made by junior officers with little understanding of the
historical value of a particular document or file.
They need to
understand the importance of the need to preserve past records for
scrutiny after an interval and through the due process of
declassification. This enables succeeding generation of government
officials an invaluable past perspective on a decision. It also enriches
the field of historical research, they offer us a means of accessing
our past. Detailed information on past conflicts or decisions is
important for the succeeding generation of security officials to learn
lessons from.
Separating the routine and the confidential is an
important aspect of government policy. Routine information should be
easily available to the public, but equally, in the interests of the
people, the government needs to work out a uniform system for
classifying, safeguarding and declassifying national security related
information. It must set up classification standards, levels of
classification, categorise classification authority, duration of
classification and the process of declassification or downgrading the
classification of a document. None of this exists at present.
The
government needs to evolve a modern system of classifying, safeguarding
and declassifying national security information, if needs be by amending
or replacing the Official Secrets Act.
The ministries of external
affairs, defence and home affairs have taken up work on one aspect of
the Public Records Act – that of creating special record rooms where
classified documents can be properly stored. However, they have largely
ignored the second, and more important, aspect – declassifying old
records and passing them on to the National Archives where they can be
accessible to the citizen.
The big problem they face is the issue of declassification. They simply lack the manpower to deal with the issue.Scroll.in October 23, 2016